Nissan Engineers Hack Leaf EV, Get 150-Mile Driving Range

Working in their spare time, a group of Nissan engineers wanted a prototype Leaf electric car for a local motorsport event. The engineers, from Nissan’s Innovation team at the Nissan Technical Center (NTCE) in Barcelona, Spain, worked on the car for six-months and created a Leaf with a 48-kilowatt hour battery pack good for driving 150 miles. That’s a battery twice the size, both physically and by capacity, of the current 24-kilowatt hour battery in the Nissan Leaf S. Codenamed “Cocoon” after the 1980s sci-fi movie, the team took the prototype car to a local racing event called ECOseries. As you might guess from its name, this is a race that favors fuel economy and efficiency, not outright speed. The extracurricular project paid off, the Cocoon took first place at the ECOseries race. “It has been a great privilege to work on this project and to see our finished prototype r...